


All Witches Need Love

by song_of_orpheus



Series: Orpheus does Les Mis Ladies' Week 2018 [5]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/F, Mostly just Gothique nonsense, Tholomyès is only mentioned don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 21:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15671253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/song_of_orpheus/pseuds/song_of_orpheus
Summary: Day Five of Les Mis Ladies' WeekPrompt: Family of ChoiceFantine is a witch. She's also alone, and about to bear a child. Her family chooses her.





	All Witches Need Love

Fantine is a witch of the most unreal kind. When her lover leaves her, bare-faced and simple and golden as he thought she was, she finds herself decaying.

 

It’s a slow process. She’s still in the hotel room with the other girls – Dahlia and Zéphine and Favourite – when they start laughing, milkwater sadness dripping from their lips. They tell her that all their lovers are gone, that all her love magic has failed her. They do not realise she used none; so she stays impossibly silent, golden hair rusting on her cheeks, fingers red and somehow raw against her wrist.

 

When the others leave, they do not turn around.

 

On the train back to her flat – which rattles and rattles at her spine – she repaints her nails half a dozen times over, in a dark beetle-eyed green. It leaves her flesh charred to paleness, and thin. Stepping over the threshold of the crevice flat in the banlieurs, her pink heels catch on the door-frame and she falls. The carpet swallows redness whole, leaving her choking out there, fish-eyed.

 

A poltergeist weeps in the corner. They don’t usually weep, she knows; they’re things of chaos, the bacchanal turned to air. She closes her eyes, but still sees it, and it melts itself into whiteness in the backs of her eyelids.

 

Her lover: with lips that bled so much gold that she would catch it in her hands and weave it into fine jewellery and clothes. No-one weaves any more. Time falls apart. The gold disappeared from her hotel room the moment he did.

 

The poltergeist doesn’t move. Neither does Fantine, until she does.

 

Time cracks apart like hazelnuts between her teeth, but she’s heavy now, pregnancy thinning her blood and thickening her skin. She sings an unknown hymn, sure the child will have the voice of a skylark, sure she will love them. The song brands itself into her, awake or asleep. She slumbers for days on end, then stays awake long enough the stars themselves burn her eyes.

 

She misses her friends, misses control over her Craft. Now, magic bleeds out of her with every breath, and she’s alone in the huge tiny flat with the poltergeist who won’t leave.

 

Nobody ever told her she had such power, but the creature in the flat must know. They leave her alone, anyway. She offers them tea – who else would offer such to the eldritch? - but it turns cold in the corner. When she goes to wash the mug out, it’s turned to blue ink. She realises that she cannot write any longer.

 

Favourite could write, that was her grace. She would write fairy-tales and ghost stories, write magic into being in the summer air itself. Her painted crimson lips trace the outside of Fantine’s mind, and she desperately wants to kiss them.

 

Alone and silent, she births the child and names her Cosette. Or rather, she will name her that one day.

 

It’s only then, the baby crying, that she can weep herself. Tears burn her insides into a husk, flicker on her white skin and throb in her bones.

 

When she does, a tree sprouts from the middle of her living room – Hawthorn. It scratches itself into being and almost tears the building apart in doing so. She’s on the third floor. Her neighbours do not ask; who would ask questions of the witch? Strangers turn away from the building, breathe hot air into their palms. It is August.

 

Fantine is afraid, though. Her flat simmers into fantasy, and she lets it – there is nothing she can do. She has no family. She’ll protect the baby, she knows, and weep, she must. A sludge of sobs trudging down her cheeks, marking age like church bells.

 

But then her friends _return._

 

Dahlia first, a primrose dressed in green. Her hair is in rollers that sting to the touch, and she sings through her teeth. It’s a thin song that curls in the air. The baby sleeps, and she watches with a nymphlike smile.

 

Zéphine next, with a laugh that slams the door open, and washing skirts of claret. She presses a wine-honey kiss to Dahlia’s cheek, then opens the windows to _everything._ The poltergeist is gone by the time she turns around.

 

Last is Favourite, in black. She enters slowly, boots clicking lazily, and seats herself in the boughs of Fantine’s hawthorn tree. She looks gorgeous there, Fantine realises, and when she kisses her palm hard and wet, Fantine stops remembering the man who hurt her.

 

They raise a witch-child, the four of them. Neighbours abandon the flats around them, and the building becomes a home of the cursed and the enchanted. The queer.

 

One day, while the baby is sleeping in her arms, Fantine kisses Favourite back. That cynical woman laughs sharply, but kisses her again and again until they’re both painted into a comforting shadow. Zéphine and Dahlia giggle from the next room.

 

Favourite holds her and holds her until she’s real again. Fantine tells her that love is a choice, and that she chooses _her._

 

And that’s enough for all of them.


End file.
